


skyggen tager mig i nat

by meritmut



Series: an old, old wood [1]
Category: Jordskott (TV), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Dog BB-8, F/M, Forests, Implied violence and murderings and possibly eatings, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Skogsrå
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-14
Updated: 2018-11-14
Packaged: 2019-08-23 14:45:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16621019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: “Who are you?”“A friend.”“Not an answer.”His mouth twitches—trying to smile, she realises. She amuses him.—or, skogsrå Rey meets skogsrå Ben





	skyggen tager mig i nat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kimaracretak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/gifts).



> apparently all it took to start the jordskott au i've been sitting on for two and a half years was for someone to actively tell me to start the jordskott au
> 
> title from myrkur's 'hævnen'

**

With the morning light comes the waking of the wood, and the stirring of the girl in the hollow.

She comes to consciousness with blood on her hands, blood under her nails and a bitterness like iron on her tongue, and no memory at all of how it got there. The reek of human fills her nose: her head spins like a storm came sweeping through it in the night. Sinking her fingers into the soft dirt, she grips it till the dizziness passes and it no longer feels like the earth will vibrate out from under her.

Carefully, now, she pushes herself upright, and the smell of man is replaced by the ripe stink of unwashed girl. She recognises _that,_ at least.

There’s another smell, though, beyond the blood and the sweat and the animal fear that choke her throat. Bleary-eyed, the girl casts around her for the source of it.

She is not long in the search.

There is a boy crouched in the entrance to the gully.

No—he is not a boy. He is a man, and a large one; the girl would fit twice over into the breadth of his hunched shoulders, his arms and legs like the branches of a pale tree. She herself is rigid with alarm even before her eyes have finished their accounting of his bulk and risen to take stock of his face: the narrow, pensive features, the dark doe gaze and the crow-black hair that hangs about his cheeks and makes him seem almost girlish. It isn’t this which soothes her—any human may look like something they are not, and she knows better than to trust the softness in a man’s eyes.

It is the smell of him which allays some of her fear, the smell which tells her that this stranger is not human at all.

The dog is curled up at his feet, red tongue lolling as he scratches her behind the ears.

 _Traitor,_ the girl thinks.

The stranger is waiting for something. She gives him nothing.

“Don’t be afraid,” he says eventually.

The tangle of rock and earth and root at her back had protected her while she slept: now it might prove a cage. “I’m not afraid,” she tells him. “Who are you?”

“A friend.”

“Not an answer.”

His mouth twitches—trying to smile, she realises. She amuses him. “Your host, then. You’re in my home, so I suppose that makes you my guest.”

Rey glances around her. She hadn’t noticed the smells or signs of another, when she took shelter in the little hollow—there hadn’t been time, but now she has a moment to regain her bearings she can see it, the way the roots over her head have been bent over years to form a sort of woven bower; the way the earth itself protects the space within.

“It’s alright,” the stranger has turned away from her to lavish more attention on Beebee, who looks up at him with such adoring eyes that Rey glowers. “You’re safe here.”

The thought of _safe_ makes her think of the other men—the ones who had chased her through the wood last night, who would have killed her or done something worse with her and her vision tints _red_ as her lips pull back to let loose a low snarl, as Beebee’s head snaps toward her, sensing the rage and fear that roll from her in bristling waves. The hound growls deep in her throat in the strange discordant sympathy of the hunted, and Rey remembers how they met—the injured dog, backed into a corner on the edge of the scrapyard, outnumbered, dwarfed and not going down without a fight.

The man lifts his hands away after giving the beast a nudge, and Beebee—more biddable than Rey has ever seen her—springs up and trots over to drop her head in Rey’s lap, blinking up at her with those big brown eyes. Rey wraps her arms around the dog’s neck and presses her face into the soft fur there, grateful that she hasn’t been _completely_ abandoned by her one and only companion.

“Thought you’d found a new friend,” she mumbles. Beebee responds with an affectionate lick to her jaw, chasing the blood gone dry there.

The stranger is gazing at her again when she lifts her head to find him. His stare unnerves her.

“Those men,” she begins, and falters.

The man tilts his head, considering her. “They can’t hurt you anymore, Rey.”

Cold shock rushes through her. “How do you know me?”

Something flits across his face—frustration? “People are looking for you.”

“Were _you?”_   She is unarmed and on the back foot, with nothing to defend herself but her voice and a dog who already seems too fond of him, but if he means to harm her then she will fight and scream and raise murderous hell to get away. She won’t be cornered like a rat in a nest, not least when the nest has been the snake’s all along.

The stranger sighs. Slowly, he shifts to seat himself against the stone, folding his legs so he no longer blocks the way out of the hollow. He settles there with his back to the earth and gestures as if to say _there, see?_

“Yes,” he admits, “and I swear to you it’s a good thing that I found you first.”

Rey glares up at him from her refuge in Beebee’s fur. “Tell me your name. You have mine. I want yours.”

“Kylo.”

“Who are you, Kylo?”

“I told you. A friend.”

“I don’t have any friends.”

“I know,” he is studying her more closely now, perhaps to see if his words will enrage her. “You’re so lonely. I can feel it. You’re like me.”

She knows, oh, she knows what it is he means. She can smell it on him, the _likeness,_ the instinctual sense that he is more than what he appears, but he seems to know so much more of her, and enough have tried to get under her skin that Rey has resolved to never make it easy. She would have it from his own mouth.

“What do you mean?”

Kylo, if this is his name, draws in a breath. He is not well-practised at patience, she understands, but he is trying. He closes his eyes and his body goes unnaturally still and when he opens them again, the brown of his irises is shot through with an amber light so deep and vivid it is almost ruby. The air shimmers around him, the wind stirs in the tree-roots and his hair.

He holds Rey’s gaze until she nods her head, acknowledging him for what he is, and then it is over. He is a man again, but whatever doubt she had as to his nature is no more.

It is strange, to sit beside another and not fear him—because she doesn’t, Rey realises. He holds no threat for her.

“Is that why you’re here?” she asks.

“Yes. And...you called to me.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did. I felt you—you cried out, as they chased you.”

Being chased is the last thing she remembers. After that, nothing.

“I...there’s only flashes...” flashes of adrenaline and terror, the headlong desperate hurtle through the forest and the crashing of several much bigger things in the undergrowth at her back; the fear that near-consumed her then, making a feral animal of her as she ran for her life. She hadn’t screamed, had she? Screaming would have led them right to her. “Did you help me?”

“No. I was too far away.”

“But you came.”

“You were hard to ignore,” he says it with a shrug, like it means nothing very much to him that he should hear her and come seeking her, when in her panicked flight she does not remember even calling out, but Rey turns her face from him so Kylo cannot see the stricken look there.

Long ago, under the eaves of another wood—or perhaps it was this one, and she is only beginning to forget; at last her memories have begun to blur and maybe one day she will leave them behind: one day, maybe, she will have no need of them, because the ones whom she has lost will come back for her and there will be no call to remember the arms that hold her, the voice which speaks her name, no need to cling to the memory of being loved—long ago, under this very wood, under these very trees, perhaps, the girl learns the first lesson of the wild: that no one comes.

No one has ever come when she cried. You learn swiftly to accept that no one ever will.

Yet here he sits.

Beebee is licking her cheeks with more intent than affection now. Rey drags her tongue over her teeth and spits a horrible brownish mess onto the dirt, and still the taste of blood lingers.

Too much blood, and none of it hers.

Kylo is looking at her again. Waiting for something—for her to realise?

No. To remember.

_They can’t hurt you anymore._

She does: she remembers.

Rey ducks her head into Beebee’s shoulder once more and buries her face there, breathing in the not-entirely-pleasant odour of damp dog as she fights to get herself under control. Beebee obliges, dear thing, if only because the movement exposes Rey’s bloodied neck and the hound is nothing if not mercenary.

“Rey.”

The implacable wrongness of hearing her name in his mouth unsettles her further. She has not given it to him: she still doesn’t know how he came by it, and there is magic in the naming of things but it feels like another kind of power entirely that wends its way under her skin and makes its home there.

He is leaning toward her when she lifts her head just enough to see. The fierce look in his eyes puts a thrill through her.

“No one can hurt you anymore,” he vows, and she believes him.

**


End file.
